An Optimistic Enemy of the State?

I picked up this quote through the Internets from Jeffrey Tucker via a friend.
Anarcho Capitalist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Someone on Reddit asked about my optimism. My response below:

The state in all times and all places wants a population of despairing, dreary, hopeless, and weighted-down people. Why? Because such people don’t do anything. They are predictable, categorizable, pliable, and essentially powerless. Such people offer no surprises, threaten no change, destabilize nothing. This is the ideal world that the bureaucrats, the plutocrats, and the technocrats desire. It makes their life easy and the path clear. Today is just yesterday and tomorrow – forever. This is the machine that the state wants to manage, a world of down-in-the-dumps and obedient citizens of the society they think they own.

In contrast, hope upsets the prevailing order. It sees things that don’t yet exist. It acts on a promise of a future different from today. It plays with the uncertainty of the future and dares imagine that ideals can become reality. Those who think this way are a threat to every regime. Why? Because people who think this way eventually come to act this way. They resist. They rebel. They overthrow.

And yet look around: we see progress everywhere. What does this imply? It implies that non-compliance is the human norm. People cannot be forever pressed into a mold of the state’s making. The future will happen and it will be shaped by those who dare to break bad, dare to disagree, and dare to take the risk to overthrow what is in favor of what can be.

I realized all this some years ago, and then when you begin to look around and see how the power elites do not and cannot rule, you discover the whole secret to social order. It turns out that they are not really in control, not finally. Then it all becomes fun. It is a blast to see the powerful topple from the thrones they want to sit in so badly. It is a thrill to use and hold technologies that no one among the elite ever gave permission to exist. It is a kick to see how the market — meaning human beings acting with vision toward the future — is so constantly outwitting the arrogant planners who want to freeze history, control our minds, and wreck our world.

To defy them is so simple: just imagine and future better than the present. You become a enemy of the state, and you begin to love every minute of it.

I think Tucker is correct in how all States view optimism. Reference The Jungle, Anthem, 1984, Stranger in a Strange Land, etc. All of these authors were giving us fictional versions of Optimism played out. In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, optimism plays an implied key role as part of the John Galt pledge, “I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” The Pledge implies that man can imagine and create a world of self-sufficiency if left unfettered by governments.

While this looks great on paper, it is true only if you allow God to guide your steps. In Jeremiah 10:23 the Prophet Jeremiah states, “LORD, I know that people’s lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps.” The research of Neuroscientist Daniel Siegel, et al. has been proving this to be true due to the natural wiring of the power of the fast part of your brain (limbic) overpowering the slow part of your brain (Pre-frontal cortex) where logic and reason occur.

Pessimism, usually driven by the limbic system being trigger by some form of fear or the memory thereof, has shown to be 5x more powerful then Optimism in controlling how we think and view the world. This is likely by design as it provides a natural defense mechanism if you are a hunter/gatherer/farmer living in nomadic tribes.

Additionally, optimism has a nasty side-effect of making us puffed up. If you can find ways to temper your pride, such as mindfulness and daily reading of and meditation on the Holy Scripture, you can mostly avoid the trap of pride while enjoying your new found status as non-pliable Citizen.